Perceptions about immigrants improve in contrast with Trump policies

Perceptions of new immigrants in the United States, including in Houston, have significantly improved since Donald Trump became the Republican presidential nominee in July 2016, despite his rhetoric on immigration, according to several polls.

Locally, the Kinder Institute’s Houston Area Survey has consistently shown an upward trend of positive views on questions about immigrants since the early 1990s.

This survey measured perceptions about immigrant contributions and questions regarding whether they should be granted citizenship if they pay taxes and learn English. This year’s survey shows positive answers well over 60 percent of the questions about immigrants.

“One of the big reasons is that the growth today among Latinos and Asians is no longer new immigrants arriving from other countries but 100 percent Americans who are the children of immigrants from 20 to 30 years ago,” said Rice University sociologist Stephen Klineberg, the author and founder of this survey.

A recent survey from Bucknell University’s Institute for Public Policy also found more favorable public perception regarding immigrants’ economic and cultural value in the U.S.

The survey, conducted by YouGov earlier this year, compared the answers to a similar one from July 2016, the same month Trump accepted the nomination.

Humanizing effect

The percentage of people who believe immigration is a net positive for the country grew from 36 to 49 percent. Those who believe immigrants have a positive impact on community culture increased from 37 to 44 percent, while respondents affirming a positive impact on the affordability of products grew from 29 to 38 percent.

On more specific questions, perceptions have improved, including among Republicans, even on measurements that have been top talking points for Trump and anti-immigration advocates. For example, more respondents this year see immigrants having a positive impact on “the wages of people like you” and “the employment prospects in your area,” compared to the first Bucknell poll.

Chris Ellis, political science professor and director of the Bucknell Survey Research Laboratory, offered some explanation for what appears to be a paradox.

“A lot of tough talk about immigration sounded really good after eight years of Obama, but now that Trump has been in office … people are getting tired of it,” Ellis said. “People have heard a president talk about the negative impact of it so much that they’re getting skeptical.”

He added that Trump’s negative rhetoric about immigrants might have also had another unintended consequence. He explained that Americans have “two minds” when discussing immigration. One perspective has skepticism about immigrants’ contributions and illegal crossings, and another sees them as hard workers who contribute to society while improving opportunities for their families.

“A lot of what Trump’s rhetoric has done has had the effect of humanizing immigrants to the American public,” Ellis said. “And once that happens, Americans think about the issue differently.” He gave as an example policies that have translated into people being deported from lifelong homes or children being separated from their families.

‘Microcosm of the world’

Other surveys, like one published by Pew Research Center last October, showed the same pattern of appreciation for immigrants. Positive perceptions of immigrants’ contributions were on the rise before Trump announced his candidacy in 2015 and have continued to increase.

“They are Americans falling in love with each other and having multiracial babies, (which is) the whole new dynamic of America as a microcosm of the world happening in Houston and other cities,” Klineberg said.

The other side of this dynamic happens in the countryside and small towns that are the heart “of the Trump base, where economies are in trouble, and there is a growing sense of worry about what happens in America,” he said.

Trump, Klineberg said, has shown his commitment to being the president of his base in particular, which is characteristically older, white and residing away from cities where most immigrants live. In this context, it becomes easier to sell a narrative that “blames immigrants for the problems of his base’s livelihood,” he said.

Trump’s negative picture of immigrants, however, becomes ever more challenging to make as children of immigrants and younger Anglos who grew up with them become adult voters, Klineberg said.

“We are living at a time of revolutionary changes, an epic transition from an America that has been, for most of its history, primarily an amalgam of European nationalities, to becoming a microcosm of the world,” he said.